Implantable blood pumps may be used to provide cardiac support to patients with late stage heart disease. Blood pumps operate by receiving blood from a patient's heart or the vascular system and impelling the blood into the patient's arterial system. By adding momentum and pressure to the patient's blood flow, blood pumps may augment or replace the pumping action of the heart.
For example, a blood pump may be configured as ventricular assist device or “VAD”, when it is used to assist the pumping action of the left or right ventricle. The device typically draws blood either from the left ventricle of the heart and discharges the blood into the aorta or from the right ventricle and discharges into the pulmonary artery. Some blood pumps may provide partial support for the patient's heart, in which case the pump may draw blood from the patient's atria. Additionally, in a case of partial support, the pump may discharge into the patient's subclavian artery.
Blood pumps provide clinically useful assistance to the heart by impelling blood at a substantial blood flow rate through the vasculature. For an adult human patient, a ventricular assist device may be arranged to pump blood at about 1-10 liters per minute at a differential pressure across the pump of about 10-110 mm Hg, depending on the site of implantation and the needs of the patient. The needs of the patient may vary with age, height, and other factors.
Some aspects of the present invention provide for: (a) regularly monitoring the patient to ensure that the patient is not at risk of certain cardiovascular health conditions, such as a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or cerebrovascular accident (CVA), e.g., ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke; and (b) assisting clinicians in their decisions about patient treatment. Methods for monitoring the patient generally require measurements, such as a patient's vitals, to be taken by a clinician and, therefore, those measurements are inconvenient for regular monitoring, let alone for continuous monitoring. Therefore, it is desirable to implement in routine clinical monitoring a system that is not only capable of monitoring operation of the blood pump which it controls, but is further capable of monitoring a patient's health based on the information gathered from the pump. The patient's health monitoring may be performed locally (in the pump controller itself) or remotely, in which case data gathered from the pump is sent to a computer center, following the remote patient monitoring paradigm.
It is further desirable to provide a clinical decision system that can predict an oncoming occurrence of an adverse cardiovascular or cerebrovascular health condition based on the information gathered from the pump.